Decolonizing Our Tongues: Interview with Lebanese Canadian Writer Hanan Hazime
Muslim Link interviewed the poet, writer and arts educator about her work and the challenges of writing authentically as a Muslim woman in Canada today.
Read the interview here.
Get to Know Hanan Hazime
We sat down with our authors so that we could share a little bit about how they connect to the chapbooks they’ve written for us, and to their writing in general.
Here’s our interview with Hanan Hazime about her upcoming chapbook, Aorta.
What inspired you to write Aorta?
As an English undergrad, I studied bpNichol’s Selected Organs which is a collection of fragmented autobiographical pieces concentrating on different parts of the body, and I was absolutely fascinated by it. At the same time, I was also double majoring in biology and all these great scientific terms and concepts kept popping up in my textbooks. To keep myself entertained during boring lectures, I would often scribble some free verse in the margins about cyanobacteria or drosophila or whatever it was that the professor was droning on about. So, drawing inspiration from bpNichol’s work and from my science courses, I thought it would be fun to explore various parts of the human anatomy through the lens of poetry. I’m planning to go through the whole human body. My next collection will most likely be about the human brain, but I’m also interested in exploring inconspicuous body parts like the clavicle or the spleen.
Who have been your biggest inspirations, as a writer?
Ahh! This question is so difficult to answer. I’m an avid reader and I love literature so my list of inspirational authors is quite long. If we are limiting it to poets, then I’d say one of my biggest inspirations is Sylvia Plath. I’ve also been heavily influenced by the works of Nizar Qabbani, Khalil Gibran, Keats, Yeats, Wordsworth, Rumi, Emily Dickinson, Margaret Atwood, E.E Cummings, Maya Angelou, Mary Oliver, Adrienne Rich, Robert Kroetsch, Mohja Kahf… the list is endless, really.
Read the full interview here.
Hanan Hazime 